Thursday, 12 February 2015

A couple of our customers have ordered a bunch of leased lines from BT, but unfortunately the original orders weren't quite specific enough and the IPv4 addresses haven't been allocated quite right (we just need a bit of a routing change, some new small subnets allocating, and one of the circuits needs a bigger subnet). Its a few weeks until these lines go in so I thought I'd preempt any problems and correct the order well in advance.

Apparently I was wrong - BT say we can't change the order without delaying the whole installation. They advise that we should wait until the circuits are installed and then order the IP address changes and they will be done <em>on the same day</em>.

Sounds completely bonkers to me - why on earth can they do same-day changes on a live circuit (which actually requires reconfiguring it), but making changes to an order (which is just a paperwork exercise) that won't be fulfilled for weeks isn't possible without delaying it?

Oh well, no big deal, I'm just a bit stunned that configuring everything wrong and then correcting it is preferred over getting it right in the first place.